Archive for February, 2010

February 26th, 2010

Black Hole Box

I was supposed to create something that responded to my relationship with energy. I use energy, selfishly. Like any other creature, I think about my needs, not about how those needs impact the larger systems of which I’m a part. I wanted to make an unnatural, inorganic living thing, an exceptionalist machine.

Black Hole Box is a black box connected to the internet that uses up batteries by continually checking the charge remaining in the batteries. When it drops below a certain threshold, the onboard microprocessor orders more batteries online. The batteries, which it orders from a local supplier, arrive within four days and the Black Hole Box’s owner must change them. The system’s survival depends on money that it doesn’t earn, energy it doesn’t produce, and processes it can’t control.

February 26th, 2010

Exitstentialism

This week I thought about sustainability, energy, and systems. Specifically, I thought about how people encapsulate and divide systems in ways that would be considered shady by even the most unscrupulous accountant. Solar energy, yay! Except that solar panels don’t last all that long and their production requires huge amounts of cadmium and other super toxic and “unsustainable” materials. Or the DDT ban in the 1960s that went into effect only in the developed world. DDT sales continued abroad for decades. But guess what, the water in Africa is connected to the water in Ohio! Rachel Carson’s movement, like much of the activism of the 60s, was eventually commoditized and co-opted when corporations adopted its language of environmental responsibility while engaging in virtually unregulated dumping and disposal practices that have led to the mercury-filled fish that we’ve been eating for the last twenty years.

Part of the problem, I realized, is that there is little alternative. Here is everything I threw away over the past week:

Orange juice carton and plastic screw top

Toilet paper (about one roll)

15 banana peels

2 plastic forks (neither at home)

1 plastic spoon

17 plastic supermarket bags

1 Styrofoam dinner tray (social hour at ITP)

Pork fat

3 egg shells

Grape stems

2 dozen roses

3 paper plates (pizza)

Numerous paper napkins

2 individual plastic cream containers (diner)

Plastic 1 qt. yogurt tub

10 plastic bags vegetables and fruit came in

Broccoli bits

Pork rib bones

Used saran wrap

Tin foil

3 Q-Tips

15 tea bags

A ball of my wife’s hair

English muffin cardboard box and plastic wrapper

Garlic peel

Onion peel

Celery stalk

Fish bones

Junk mail

Plastic magazine sleeve

Half a broken plastic watch band

Padded envelope

Plastic cookie tray and wrapper

Various receipts/tickets

Cabbage bits

Squash ends

Can clams came in

3 glass bottles

Paper bag

Paper coffee cup

Sandwich wrapper (wax paper)

4 Styrofoam meat trays

Soap, dish detergent, toothpaste, shampoo

A fair volume of urine

Four or five respectable shits

Sawdust/small electronic bits in the shop

5+ hours playing Chain Factor

Most of my garbage is either organic food waste or the packaging it comes in. No matter how fancy/organic/expensive food is, still comes wrapped in several layers of plastic. Much of my out of the house waste was the result of eating at cheap places around NYU, where everything comes in disposable containers/on disposable plates. Reducing my packaging waste would ironically require me to spend a lot more money: on meals at better restaurants with reusable flatware and silverware and on “responsibly packaged” frou-frou organic groceries. I would compost my organic waste if I had the space or something to do with the compost, but I have neither. I could buy one of those midget pigs. But even that seems shortsighted. I buy a pig, it eats my garbage thus keeping it out of landfills where it would eventually turn into methane, but its porcine stomach also turns it into methane. There is no escaping the interconnectedness of everything on earth.

This why the idea of “organic” products is such bullshit. Yes, it makes sense to minimize our impact on the planet’s ability to sustain us if we can, but the implication that the application of technology to a problem renders it somehow artificial or inorganic is preposterous. You can’t just pick starting and stopping points to assess some product or interaction’s impact. For instance, not using chemical pesticides in no way eliminates the residual pesticides, industrial particles, and all the other human-made muck that will fall with the rain as long as somewhere in the planet people are spraying chemicals on their crops and releasing smoke into the atmosphere. Rain cannot certified organic. Neither can groundwater. Everything is interconnected. So-called organic products are still shipped using trucks and trains and boats and planes which burn fossil fuels. Where do we stop assessing for sustainability?

The real problem is that it doesn’t even matter. If I leave every energy-inefficient tungsten bulb in my house on for the rest of my life—and if everyone else I’ve ever met does the same—it won’t use even a fraction of the energy required to run a steel manufacturing plant for one day. It is not in the interest of governments or corporations to assess the real costs of their activities, nor do they have the tools. Cost accounting is a financial process. From whose bottom line do we subtract dead rivers? The market can’t fix what it is responsible for breaking. That’s what makes the commoditization of C02 and other pollutants and emissions allowances so nefarious and nonsensical.

In the end, progress, production, and consumption serve to distract us from our lack of significance, taking over religion’s role throughout much of history. If I remember correctly, human exceptionalism—the idea of humanity as somehow separate from “nature”—arose in response to the industrial revolution. Romantics, Transcendentalists, the Sierra Club, Hippies, and New Agers all called for a return to nature. What does that mean? At what point did we become separate from nature? Aha, you say, plastics don’t occur in nature. Really? Did we get them from aliens? Or did we make them from materials available around us, much as bees make honeycomb? Just as fusion at the center of a star produces heavier and more massive elements, so we produce increasingly complex materials—that doesn’t make them unnatural. That they don’t decompose just means that no creature has yet evolved to take advantage of their energy-rich polymers—and that they’ll outlive us.

A maudlin and silly nostalgia for an idyllic pastoral past (and, I suspect, the lack of yearning for meaning that comes with consciousness) has plagued us since our expulsion from Eden. In the end, our exceptionalism is our humanity. It’s also the source of a great many of our problems. Environmentalism pits “us” against the environment, which is absurd. We are our own opponent. We talk of poisoning rivers or warming the globe when we’re actually poisoning ourselves and making the globe uninhabitable for humans. The rivers and the earth will survive. Ultimately, it makes no difference what we do because we’re just like any other species, and that, I think is something that most people find very hard to accept.

February 25th, 2010

Geovideo

This week, a film canister with a roll of paper was hidden somewhere in New York, its approximate location posted on a Google Map along with a video with extra clues. My clue (no. 5) is on the corner of Broadway and 8th and was filmed on a Sony Ericsson G705. Double click on the YouTube clips to see them in their own window.

[UPDATE 2014]It appears Google has changed how one embeds media into maps, so the videos are no longer showing up when you click on the place markers. Dan Liss owns the map I believe, so it will remain blank until he does—indefinitely I’m guessing.

February 18th, 2010

Incen(si)tive

UPDATE:This project had a fantastic ending. After several months in the men’s bathroom raising eyebrows, making staff chuckle and the water guy look forward to refill day, the ladies met a fitting end. Near the end of the madness of the Spring Show in May, a group of thirteen-year-old boys discovered the ladies and went into a kind of frenzy, tearing them out of their plastic housings and stuffing them under their shirts. I could not have hoped for better.

Make a system. Do it with three of your classmates. Go.

Matt, Marco, Sarah, and I met two nights ago to talk about systems. The conversation started with fully formed systems. Matt brought up a number of ideas for creating interesting interactions within the class—ropes on pulleys, melting snowballs packed with India ink—which I objected to on the grounds that “neatness” does not a system make. Having just read an article that noted that only humans can provide feedback in a technological system, I countered with the possibility of creating a system that devolves into chaos unless constantly tended, like audio feedback or juggling. Not so popular either. Marco mentioned food and and mobiles, to which Sarah added balancing. We discarded games outright (too tip of the brain). We were briefly enthusiastic about using the whole Floor in some way—laying a string-based communication system along all the cable trays or bouncing a laser beam from room to room using a series of mirrors—but Matt had already done that (and it was awesome, by the way, so still a solid idea).

Discouraged by our seeming lack of progress, we tried teleology. What purpose could a hypothetical communication system of our creation serve at ITP that was not already the province of an existing system?

Marco mentioned the water bubbler in the front hall. We have two water bubblers at ITP. One is in the front hall; the other is across from the bathrooms at the far end of the back hall that leads to Red’s office. The extra jugs are stored in the men’s room, stacked floor to ceiling on their sides in crates along the wall. If the bubbler in front of the bathrooms runs out, no problem, some passing man can easily be co-opted into going into the bathroom to grab a full jug or some free-thinking woman can make a quick incursion when the coast is clear. The bubbler in the front hall, however, often goes empty several days before someone finally lugs a full jug all the way across the Floor. What if we created a way of communicating that the jug in the front hall needed replacing to the bathroom? We discussed wireless radios, string, a siren, and abandoned the idea for more talk of melting, inky ice.

I remembered going to see Eric Maskin talk right after he’d won the Nobel Prize for his work on mechanism design theory, a system that allows two or more parties to reach an agreement that accomplishes a desired outcome even when their priorities and goals are unstated. The simplest example is the mom with two kids and one piece of cake: she wants them to split it without complaining, they each want the bigger piece. One mechanism that gives everybody what s/he wants is to have one child cut the cake and the other choose which piece he wants. I mentioned this story. Everyone nodded tiredly. We reluctantly returned to the water jugs as our frontrunner, and then we had our breakthrough.

A SYSTEM, SYSTEMICALLY PROBLEMATIZED

Trying to hammer out the technical details of signaling an empty jug across the Floor, we realized we didn’t need a technological solution, we needed an incentive! We could hide money behind some of the jugs so when they are pulled out, a dollar bill drops down. No, too venal, and besides, who’s going to pay? We could attach messages or riddles or candy or some other small reward. Then Sarah brought up the crucial point that the jugs are in the men’s room, thus only men will receive the incentive. That made us jump. Porn! Matt drew us all close together and whispered, “Juggs! Juggs behind the jugs!” thereby tying the conceptual knot into a tidy little bow.

I’m not joking when I say that this is one of my favorite projects so far this year. We’ve created a system that with its very existence calls attention to itself as well as lots of other systems. By choosing pornography as our reward for altruism, we’re calling attention to and extending the male stereotypes that played a role in the decision to store water jugs exclusively in the men’s room. Men can lift, men are brawny, men like boobs. On top of that system flows its opposite, a current of political correctness that will find such assumptions offensive or, less contentiously, single out a few ITP men at random to dispel any illusions of brawn. Pornographic portrayals of women also raise questions within religious and political contexts, and placed as they are in a charged semi-private space, one also wonders about their social implications. Should any discussion ensue, it will take place over a variety of communication channels, exposing our decision-making and accountability systems.

Besides facilitating discussion of itself, this system is also notable because despite its crudeness, it works. It has a clear purpose, a mechanism that coordinates several distinct components, and an agnosticism for other systems that while important to our community are not essential in this particular case. Changing a water jug requires only one person. It doesn’t matter if our pornographic incentive discourages 119 people from having anything to do with the water jugs if there’s 1 that can’t help but think of breasts every time he passes the bubbler. In a community that includes roughly 120 men, it seems safe to assume that a good portion like to look at women’s breasts and that a few are true enthusiasts. So even if we alienate a portion of the community that might otherwise occasionally change a jug, by creating one or two water jug fanatics we ensure that there is always water to drink in the front hall.

Some connections also rely on alterations of chemical/atomic structure to connect. These tend to be much harder to reverse than many physical connections: fusion, dissolution, cooking/firing/baking.

Then there are metaphysical connections, the connections we talk about between people or ideas or events, which I would characterize as a kind of sharing—be it of traits, genealogy, interests, friends, provenance, themes, or causality. We use the language of physical connection to describe these: bound in holy matrimony, causal chain, linked in, ties of blood.

The thing that connects all these expressions is the purpose of the connections to which they draw analogy: to constrain motion. Hinges, shackles, cuffs, reins, and handles all restrict motion through connection. Connectors are often also channels for the passage of something from two otherwise separate entities: tubes, pipes, wires, electromagnetic waves, buses, word of mouth, and all manner of electrically conductive materials act as connections that transport.

The most interesting of these of course being neurons. It is in connection, impossibly tangled and branching and complex connection, that our consciousness resides, that we understand the world.

I prototyped a nifty switch hidden in a magnetic box. A light is on when it’s not physically connected to something, but as soon as the magnetic (physical connection) is made, the electrical (channel) connection is broken. The two cannot coexist. But that’s an arbitrary fact of wiring. I could just as easily have wired the light only to turn on when the box is magnetically attached to something else.

Which made me realize that connections are most interesting when they are broken, when they’re forbidden, when they are unintended. Secret liaisons make good stories, short-circuits end in fires, ruptured pipelines induce panic. This is the great appeal of the mashup—possibly even the power of cinema (wasn’t it Eisenstein who wrote about cutting and the mental jumps the mind makes?)—the juxtaposition of disparate elements that our minds nonetheless connect.

That is pretty much how my favorite parts of my brain work, making strange and unexpected connections with unpredictable outcomes. It’s also the way humor works, uncovering the unexpected connection to spark a laugh. So after much unsatisfying PComping, I ended up turning to the now almost clichéd connectivity of the web to explore the pleasure of the unexpected connection. Part php and part spit, Jumblr is a website that makes unexpected connections by jumbling links, either within a site or between two sites. It works by scraping a site, parsing its links and storing them in an array using XPath, shuffling the array, and then returning them via preg_replace(). Right now it breaks when sites use relative links because they end up pointing to my domain, but once I figure out how to construct a conditional regular expression, I’ll be able to fix that problem. I’m also going to develop a Javascript link interceptor so that the randomization persists with each link click.

February 8th, 2010

Back Pocket in the Front: An Exploration of Modularity

Make a module. This is the kind of assignment that is always better in retrospect (as this tardy write-up can attest).

Thinking about modules and the arenas in which they frequently appear led me to some interesting insights, not the least of which was a clear idea of the connector I want to build this coming week.

A module encapsulates a functionality within some larger, more complicated system. When properly designed, it can be joined smoothly with existing modules of the same or different types. Modular furniture, trains, pre-fab architecture, object-oriented programming, modulated and demodulated data streams, toys, and space stations are all modular because modularity makes decorating, managing freight, building, coding, communicating, playing, and not dying in a vacuum easier and less error prone, even in the presence of significant future uncertainty. Think back to Powers of Ten—the entire universe is modular!

I started my exploration of modularity by making modules of something homogeneous, which if my notions above are true achieves no added efficiency or ease through modularization. I peeled and sliced a banana such that the slices could be interchanged within the peel. Then I ate it. Not quite the robustness I was aiming for.

I then toyed with creating a code-based exploration of image pixels and letters (by translating one into the other so that an email might be encoded as an image composed of apparently arbitrary pixels), but the spatial advantages of modularity were just too compelling to ignore. You can place a modular couch in a space of any shape! Have a corner? It wraps around it! Straight wall? It becomes a love seat for twenty!

But how does one modularize without atomizing, without simply breaking something big into identical smaller segments? By separating functions the way code does. For some reason, I immediately thought about clothes and those zip-off sleeves from the Eighties. Clothing’s modularity (at least wearable clothing’s) is anatomically constrained. In theory I could make pants that accept as many legs as you care to attach—fun maybe, but not so useful.

Thinking about pant legs got me thinking about the make-up of clothing more generally—and led me to pockets. Most of my pants have at least two sets of pockets: the side ones that are sewn into the garment and the back ones that are sewn on. I carry lots of stuff in my pockets and I don’t ever seem to have enough room, and I prefer the bulge of a full exterior back pocket to the chafing of a stuffed inner one, though I can’t stand carrying things around where I can’t see them and inevitably crush them when I sit too enthusiastically. The answer?

Modular magnetic pockets. They can be attached to any part of any garment using a discreet, low-profile magnetic strip (or wadded up and crazily sewn elastic as in my prototype) that lies flat along the inside and firmly attaches the pocket to the outside.

February 5th, 2010

Eggsistence

This week’s cinematic challenge was to create the visual equivalent of Hemingway’s terse but complete “For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn,” a microcinematic three-shot story. I composed and shot a story about putting an egg carton with only two eggs left in it in the fridge and opening the next morning to find the two eggs snuggling cozily in adjacent spaces, surrounded by half a dozen quail eggs. Then I read Robert Bresson’s Notes sur le Cinématographe, and it made me think that maybe I shouldn’t force the egg to tell a story but rather to capture the story inherent in the egg.

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WHAT (THE FAQ) IS ITP?

I currently lead a small team of engineers and designers at Google that explores new interaction modalities with computers. We were responsible for Google Cardboard and Google Tone among other things. Before that, I was in graduate school in New York. And before that I lived and worked in Shanghai for 6 years.